Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

by Robert A. Caro

  This liberal anger certainly appeared justified. In fighting for the filibuster, Lyndon Johnson had seemingly only been doing in early January, 1957, what he had done so many times before. It was only natural for liberals who for twenty years had seen Lyndon Johnson standing squarely on the side of the South and against civil rights to assume that during the rest of 1957 he would be standing on the same side again.

  But he wouldn’t. During Lyndon Johnson’s previous political life, compassion had constantly been in conflict with ambition, and invariably ambition had won. Given the imperatives of his nature, in such a conflict, it had been inevitable that the ambition would win. For the compassion to be released, to express itself in concrete accomplishments, it would have to be compatible with the ambition, pointing in the same direction. And now, at last, in 1957, it was.

  So Lyndon Johnson changed—and changed the course of American history. For at last this leader of men would be leading, fighting, not only for himself but for a great cause. This man who in the pursuit of his aims could be so utterly ruthless—who would let nothing stand in his way; who, in the pursuit, deceived, and betrayed and cheated—would be deceiving and betraying and cheating on behalf of something other than himself: specifically, on behalf of the sixteen million Americans whose skins were dark. All through Lyndon Johnson’s political life—as congressman and senator, as congressman’s secretary and NYA director—there had been striking evidence not only of compassion but of something that could make compassion meaningful: signs of a most unusual capacity, a very rare gift, for using the powers of government to help the downtrodden and the dispossessed. This capacity had always been held in check by his quest for power. Now he had the power. Power reveals. The compassion that had been hidden was to be revealed now—in full. Did those sixteen million Americans need a mighty champion in the halls of government? They were about to get one.

  HIS FIRST JOB was to persuade southern senators that they should allow a civil rights bill to pass—that even though they had preserved the filibuster, they shouldn’t use it.

  To persuade them, he employed, in individual conversations with these senators and in meetings of the Southern Caucus in Richard Russell’s office, several arguments that his actions on Rule 22 made them more disposed to accept.

  Some of these arguments were valid. The times were changing, he told them, and we (he always used “we” in talking with the southerners; he had been using that pronoun since his “We of the South” speech in 1949) had better wake up to that. Demand for civil rights legislation was rising. Civil rights was a big issue, and it was going to get bigger—and we look bad on that issue. The Republicans had decided to do anything they had to do to win the nigger vote. (He usually used that noun in talking with southerners, varying its pronunciation to fit the senator; it was “Nigras” with some senators from the Middle South, “Negras” with Eastland or Olin Johnston.) The Republicans were making civil rights a party issue—their issue. It’s a tough issue for the Democrats. It’s hurting us. Look what happened in the last election; look at that vote in Harlem! And it’s hurting us because of what we’re doing here in the Senate. The perception is that the Senate is the roadblock, the reason that no civil rights bill has passed in eighty-two years. And it’s easy for Negroes to put the blame on the Senate, because we’re exposed here. Did you hear what the voters out in Oregon were saying to Dick Neuberger about ol’ Jim? And we’re not only weak in the Senate because our Republican friends seem to have suddenly forgotten everything we’ve done for them, and not only because Bill Knowland is going to run for Governor of California, and he needs the Negro vote. Don’t forget who the presiding officer is. Nixon is going to try to out-nigger Knowland. He’s conniving with the NAACP right now to put us on the spot so we’ll look bad. If we don’t do something, that issue is going to hurt the whole Democratic Party even worse in ’58 and ’60. Look what can happen to us in the Senate. All the Republicans have to do is take one seat. One seat! Then it’ll be a tie, and Nixon will break it, and we won’t even get to organize the Senate again. They will. And the only way to defuse that issue is to let a token bill go through so the Republicans can’t say we’ve stopped all civil rights legislation again.

  The validity of some of the other arguments he was making to the southern senators is more difficult to assess. One argument that Johnson made a centerpiece of his case to the southerners was that we might not even win a filibuster this time, that cloture might be imposed—first, because we’ve got fewer votes: Kefauver isn’t going to vote with us, all he can think about is being President, and maybe Gore won’t be with us, either; that brings us down to twenty votes. And there were other arguments. For a long time we didn’t have to worry about cloture, because we could count on the support of the Republicans in the Senate. Now, he said, that support was gone, and we’d better realize that. The whole Republican Party, from the top down, was going to pander to the Negroes; the President will put pressure on the Republican senators, the Vice President will, Bill Knowland will—and the Republican senators themselves will see the opportunity not only for the Republican presidential candidate but for themselves. What are we going to do, Lyndon Johnson asked the southerners, if one day we go to the Republicans for the rest of the thirty-three votes we need to sustain a filibuster and the votes aren’t there? And the problem wasn’t only with the Republicans. The times were changing, he told them, agitation for civil rights legislation was rising, and therefore pressure on all their Senate colleagues, Democrat as well as Republican, was rising. It was going to be steadily more difficult for non-southern Democrats to vote with the South.

  And even if we do stave off cloture this year, he told the southerners, filibustering this year will hurt us in years to come. There was just too much sentiment out there in the country against filibustering. It’s too easy a target. You heard what Nixon said in Harlem: “If you support Ike and elect a Republican Senate, you’ll get action, not filibusters.” Thurmond aide Harry Dent, who had been assigned by Thurmond, more suspicious of Johnson than the other southern senators, to “hang out in the Democratic cloakroom” and listen to “what LBJ was up to,” says that Johnson was arguing that, “Yes, the southern leaders had power, but these powers would erode.” And, Johnson said, if enough Republicans go along with those goddamned bomb-throwers in our own party, how can we be sure that cloture won’t be imposed, if not in 1958, then in 1959? What if we lose the next vote to table? If Nixon then firms that opinion up into a ruling, and the Republicans have the votes to sustain it—what’re we going to do then? We might win a filibuster this year, but if we use one this year, then next year or the year after we might lose the whole right to filibuster—might lose it forever. And without a filibuster, the South is defenseless. They can pass any goddamn thing they want. Johnson, Reedy says, was telling the southerners, “Don’t filibuster! You have to let a civil rights bill pass this year! If you don’t, God knows what is going to happen!”

  Another argument he was using was that they shouldn’t filibuster because there was no need to filibuster. The Brownell Bill might be objectionable, he said, but, he said, it could be amended. Some of our friends on the other side of the aisle don’t like Brownell, or his bill, any more than we do, he said. There are some people on our side of the aisle who feel the same way, even if they can’t say so. These senators, he said, might need to vote for a civil rights bill to satisfy their constituents, but it didn’t have to be a strong bill. All these senators were his friends, he said. He could work with them. They would negotiate together. The bill might be a strong bill now, but by the time it came to a vote it would be a very different bill. It would be amended down until it was so weak that it was only a token bill.

  They could count on him, he told the southerners. He would get the bill amended down to something so weak that we have no real objection to it, to something we can live with. And then we won’t have to filibuster it. We can let it come to a vote. We’ll still vote against it, and if it passes, i
t won’t really matter. “We’re up against the wall,” he told the southerners. “We have to get the best that we can get—and we can get it! The future of the South is at stake here. We have to save the South as much as we can. If we don’t do this [let a token bill go through], all the southern principles will go down the tubes. We can’t have everything the way we want it, but we can have most of it. We’re up against the wall!” And the way to forestall all these unpleasant possibilities—of the passage of a law that would transform the southern way of life; of a defeat of a filibuster this year; of the outlawing of the filibuster in some year to come—was to allow a civil rights bill to go through this year; a weak bill but a bill, so that the Republicans could not say that the Democrats were standing in the way of any civil rights legislation at all.

  The validity of these arguments is impossible to evaluate from this distance, for what is involved is the predicting of the votes of individual senators, and so many factors might have influenced the senators that after so many years the votes can’t be predicted with any confidence. Even by the most generous estimate, however, those arguments appear to be doubtful. You got up to thirty-three real fast, Bryce Harlow says, and not only southern aides but many observers on the liberal side and the Republican side also agree. A typical comment is that of Sam Zagoria, administrative assistant to the liberal Republican Clifford Case. The liberals, he said, “felt they could win a straight vote, but they felt they couldn’t beat a filibuster.” Murray Zweben, secretary to the Senate Parliamentarian, says, “Down deep, if push came to shove, the liberals wouldn’t have had the votes they thought they had.” But some of the southerners didn’t count, had never counted—Byrd, for example. “Johnson counted for him.”

  And this helped Johnson frighten the southerners. When he told them that a filibuster might lose, many of them believed him. And some of them were frightened: the southern way of life was precious to them; how could they gamble it on an uncertainty?

  ANOTHER ARGUMENT BEING MADE to the southern senators was being made much less explicitly—generally only by implication, only in hints. And it was only occasionally made by Lyndon Johnson; usually it was made by Richard Russell—for since the argument concerned Lyndon Johnson, at times it was better that it come from someone else. It was a very persuasive argument. The South should let a civil rights bill pass, this argument said, because if it passed, Lyndon Johnson would have a better chance of becoming President.

  Was Johnson, as Reedy puts it, “in private conversations, taking advantage of a growing belief that he might be a presidential candidate”? When he told Eastland or Olin Johnston or Harry Byrd, “I’ve just got to give those bomb-throwers something to get them off my back,” did they understand him to be really saying that, as Reedy puts it, he “had to have some leeway to get national recognition”?—that if there was a no-holds-barred fight in the Senate, and he lined up on the side of the South, he would never get to be President?

  When this argument was employed on a southern senator, implicit in it, of course, was the assumption that a Johnson presidency would be a desirable thing for the South.

  Johnson—and Russell—were, in 1957, reassuring southern senators that this would indeed be the case. With the more senior southerners, those who had been working with Johnson and Russell for years and who understood the implications of the argument, it wasn’t necessary to spell them out or in some cases even to mention them. In 1957, however, there were three new southern senators, and to them things were made more explicit. Having won a special election in March, 1957, to replace Price Daniel, Texas liberal Ralph Yarborough would, on his arrival on Capitol Hill that month, pay the obligatory visit to Richard Russell about his committee assignments, and would be asked by Russell to sign the Southern Manifesto, which had been passed the year before. Yarborough declined, and tried to excuse himself by saying that his fellow Texan Johnson hadn’t signed. Russell, Yarborough recalls, replied that “he [Johnson] was running for President, and this [signing] would ruin him”—and that it was important that Johnson not be “ruined.” Thereafter, listening in the Democratic cloakroom and on the Senate floor to Johnson talk to the other southern senators, Yarborough understood the reason for Russell’s feelings. “He [Johnson] made them think he was with them, and that he’d be with them forever,” Yarborough says. The two other new members of the Southern Caucus, Herman Talmadge and Strom Thurmond, had both been sworn in on January 3, 1957—As soon as Talmadge arrived in Washington, the facts of Senate life were explained to him: thereafter he would support Johnson for the presidency, explaining his stand by saying, as a story in the Atlanta Constitution put it, that as President, “Johnson would be more favorable to the South’s position on States’ Rights, and therefore his choice … would be Johnson.” Thurmond, the former presidential candidate of Dixieland’s States Right Party and an ardent racist (after listening one day in 1957 to the South Carolinian deliver, in a dispassionate tone, a long, dogmatic discourse on the irremediable inferiority of the Negro race, Olin Johnston, ardent racist himself, was moved to comment: “Strom really believes that stuff!”), was astonished to find that Russell was not adamantly opposed to any civil rights bill at all. He felt he understood Russell’s reasoning. “I think Russell didn’t fight it [the bill] as hard as he ordinarily would have” if he hadn’t wanted Johnson to be President, Thurmond was to tell an interviewer. “He was trying to help Lyndon get elected President…”

  What did this argument mean to the southern senators? What was Johnson saying to make them feel “he would be with them forever”? Did it mean merely, as George Reedy says, that he would use the presidency as a means to heal century-old scars and make the South truly a part of the Union again, that he would “end the Civil War,” that he would be “a bridge” for the reconciliation between North and South? Certainly, some of Johnson’s aides believe this is the basic meaning. Harry McPherson was to write that “Johnson felt about the race question much as I did, namely that it obsessed the South and diverted it from attending to its economic and educational problems; that it produced among white southerners angry defensiveness and parochialism.” And most, if not all, Johnson biographers have believed it, too. “Johnson argued, and he probably believed, that the South was on the verge of new possibilities for rapid expansion,” but that those possibilities would not be exploited if the racial issue was not defused by civil rights legislation, Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote. And with some of the more tolerant, less racist southern senators such as Lister Hill or John Sparkman, that was probably what the argument meant. But did Johnson’s persuasion of other southern senators rest also on other grounds? Probably there is not one answer; almost certainly there were different emphases, depending on which senator he was talking to—arguments tailored to specific individuals by someone supremely gifted at telling each man what he wanted to hear. “We’re talking about twenty different individuals, you know,” Harry Dent says. But persuasion is in part a matter of tone, and the tone of the words and phrases that Lyndon Johnson was heard using to the southern senators—“the nigger bill,” “Negras,” “uppity”—was not that of a man interested primarily in healing wounds or building bridges or facilitating economic progress. What’s more, the Southern Caucus included not only southern moderates like Hill and Sparkman but southern racists like Byrd and Talmadge and Eastland and Olin Johnston to whom economic progress was not the predominant concern. And these racists were without exception among Johnson’s most enthusiastic supporters for the presidency. Johnson was to joke about the depth of Eastland’s racial beliefs, and about the Mississippian’s other obsession—Communist subversion—and Johnson’s aides and biographers repeat these jokes as if they are evidence of Johnson’s true feelings. Writing that “Johnson deplored East-land’s militant racism” as well as his Communist obsession, Booth Mooney quotes him as saying, “Jim Eastland could be standing right in the middle of the worst Mississippi flood ever known, and he’d say the niggers caused it, helped out by the Communists.�
� But until Johnson became President, Eastland did not deplore what he felt were Johnson’s beliefs on the issue. There was nothing about Johnson that Eastland deplored. Indeed, this archetypal racist constantly praised Lyndon Johnson in the most laudatory terms. “You have certainly made the best Majority Leader we have ever had,” he wrote him in 1956, adding, “I am leaving tomorrow for the Convention and will vote for you for President.” And he actively promoted him for the 1960 presidential nomination as well.

  And Talmadge’s statement that the reason he was supporting Johnson was that “Johnson would be more favorable to the South’s position on States’ Rights” was not a statement about wound-healing or bridge-building, as became clear when the author, after ten years of trying to obtain an interview with Talmadge, was finally granted one, which took place on January 10, 2000, at Talmadge’s home on Lake Talmadge in Georgia’s Henry County (reached by driving south from Atlanta on Herman Talmadge Highway and turning off at the exit marked “Herman Talmadge Road”).